The status plebiscite held in Puerto Rico on November 14, 1993, produced
a vote in favor of retaining commonwealth status - under which the island
is associated to the United States as a self-governing polity - as this option
won a relative majority of the votes cast in the electoral event, which were
distributed as follows: Statehood, 788,296 (46.3%); Commonwealth, 826,326
(48.6%); Independence, 75,620 (4.4%); and blank and void ballots, 10,748
(0.7%). Commonwealth won a majority of 38,030 votes over statehood. 1,700,990
of the 2,312,912 registered voters cast ballots, for a turnout rate of 73.5%.

The commonwealth option won in five of the eight Senate districts, with statehood
winning in the remaining three, including the Carolina Senate District, where
statehood won an 882-vote majority over commonwealth, out of 194,705 votes
cast in that constituency. Likewise, the commonwealth won in 24 out of 40
House of Representatives districts, as opposed to 16 which voted for statehood.
All of San Juan's five House districts voted for statehood, albeit in one
of these, House district 2, commonwealth lost to statehood by a margin of
58 votes, out of 36,430 cast in that district. Of the island's 78 municipalities,
55 voted for commonwealth and 23 for statehood.

By comparison, in the 1992 general election, the New Progressive Party (PNP),
which supports statehood for Puerto Rico, won 914,994 votes (50.3%) against
829,057 (45.6%) for the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which backs continued
commonwealth status - an arrangement established in 1952, under the governorship
of the party's founding leader, Don Luis Muñoz-Marín - and
75,166 (4.1%) for the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), which, as its
name implies, advocates the separation of the island from the United States.
In these elections, the PNP won the mayoralties of 54 municipalities, against
24 for the PPD.